'The Age of the Image,' by Stephen Apkon

The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon

The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon

Photo: Farrar, Straus And Giroux

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Stephen Apkon

Stephen Apkon

Photo: Lynda Shenkman Curtis

'The Age of the Image,' by Stephen Apkon

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The Age of the Image

Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens

By Stephen Apkon

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 263 pages; $26)

What we know as the movies began with people ogling private little screens, and with the imperative of attracting eyeballs, not making high art. That was just over a century ago, and now here we are again. Now we are poised at last to fulfill Thomas Edison's potentially worrisome proclamation that motion pictures eventually would obviate textbooks. Someone really should be asking what this means in a world where eight years' worth of new content gets put on YouTube every day.

Stephen Apkon, who runs the nonprofit Jacob Burns Film Center and Media Arts Lab in upstate New York, tackles this and related questions in his book, "The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens." For starters, Apkon believes educators should "do more than just show films and sit back." He thinks they should rewrite curricula, such that high school graduation would require, among other things, a demonstrated proficiency with scripting, shooting, cutting, online distributing and critically understanding visual media.

How else will future generations find meaning in all of our imagistic abundance? How will they reconcile all the talking dogs and Nyan cats and dancing guys and Wii Fit girls and war horrors and whatever and however many revolutions will by then have been YouTube-ized?

On the page, Apkon comes across as a curious and generous spirit. To advocate for the literacy he believes our civilization needs, he's done some useful and rigorous research on how our brains process visual information. From cave paintings to YouTube ephemera, Apkon is a keen surveyor. His appreciations are succinctly academic, his wisdom warm and teacherly.

It should be noted, though, that his subject is literacy in the most basic sense: something rudimentary and foundational for but not necessarily predictive of literary intelligence. Accordingly, his broad-strokes approach will probably leave some readers yearning for more discernment, or a deeper level of inquisitiveness.

In many ways the 2013 media landscape still feels like a new frontier, and maybe it's too soon to expect a writer to cover this ground with the laserlike consideration and lapidary style of, say, Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag - or, for that matter, San Francisco's Rebecca Solnit, whom Apkon quotes at length. That is, unless we're missing the point by expecting such profundity from a work of prose at all anymore.

In a characteristically enthusiastic foreword to Apkon's treatise, Martin Scorsese recalls an earlier generation of "sad" and "pedantic" books about cinema culture, whose theories gave off the whiff of "a strange antagonism between literature and film." Apkon at least wins Scorsese's approval for moving beyond those musty old philosophies. He seems forward-thinking and optimistic.

"The new visual literacy is going to change the social boundaries," Apkon writes. "Films are always fun to watch, and when the rewards go to the kids who show the most flair and creativity (and technical savvy) with the medium, there's going to be a shift in the standards of what makes a kid socially accepted." Well, bless his heart for hoping so.

Apkon rightly stresses the importance of story to human communication. But like many nonfiction books that strive to balance practicality with prognostication, his only really manages an assembly of storyish traits.

Techniquewise, there's some boilerplate stuff in here, like the innocuous but ultimately superfluous scene-setting whereby some interviewees have their expressions or their attire described - not because the overall narrative demanded it, but perhaps because the author felt vaguely pressured to emphasize visuality.

This nitpicking is just to reiterate that there's a vital difference between literacy and fluency, and however important it becomes to redefine the former, it remains essential not to lose sight of the latter.

Jonathan Kiefer has written for the New York Times, Salon and the Village Voice, among other publications. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com